Despite the fact that she's missing five teeth, actress Elle Fanning has plenty of reasons to smile. Like her big sister, Dakota, Fanning is, at the ripe old age of 12, already a grizzled veteran, with nearly a decade of work under her belt, and has a heavyweight résumé of decidedly grown-up films that includes I Am Sam (2001), The Door in the Floor (2004), Babel (2006), Reservation Road (2007), and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008). Now, though, Fanning is about to enter another phase in her career with the release of Sofia Coppola's new film Somewhere, in which she stars, alongside Stephen Dorff, as the daughter of a hard-partying Hollywood actor who lives in a suite at the Chateau Marmont hotel and is stumbling, perpetually bleary-eyed, through both his work and his life. For all of her youth, Fanning's performance in film is a mature one, as she struggles to reconcile her parents' stunted adulthoods with the premature onset of her own.

Following her first trip to Venice, where Somewhere took top honors at the city's film festival this past September, Fanning went into production on her next film, the J.J. Abrams-directed sci-fi thriller Super 8. (She also stars in Andrei Konchalovskiy's recently released 3-D version of The Nutcracker.) We recently caught up with Fanning in Los Angeles, where, between shooting scenes for Super 8 and doing her science homework, she sat down to talk about working on Somewhere, her obsession with Marilyn Monroe, her impressive list of on-screen dads (Penn, Pitt, and Bridges among them), her grand plans for when Dakota goes to college, and why she's going to have to find someone new to steal clothes from if she gets any taller.

LAUREN TABACH-BANK: You were born in Conyers, Georgia, but you moved to Los Angeles when you were really little. How old were you?

ELLE FANNING: I was probably about 2 when I came out here. My sister came out first to see if the whole acting thing would work out, and then we all moved out here. I don't really remember Georgia that much, but we go back if we can. I have 14 cousins there, because my dad's the youngest of eight kids. Some of them are my age, and then there's some that are younger or older. One of them is, like, 20-something.
TABACH-BANK: Are you and Dakota the only actresses of the group?

FANNING: Yeah, we're the only actresses. Everyone thinks it's really cool that we're in this business, but they're also just our family.
TABACH-BANK: Do you and Dakota share clothes?

FANNING: Yes. We're sort of the same size. I'm taller than her, though . . . She does not like that at all. [both laugh] She probably doesn't like me wearing her clothes either, but we do still share. I sneak into her closet and grab things out and put them on. She's a senior, so she's going to college soon. But we share a bathroom.